Monday 2.12.24 - 20 years of Art, Part 1 of 5

Dear Art Lover,

A grant to which I recently applied required me to offer a 20+ year history of work, to demonstrate a track record of two decades’ worth of professional art practice.  As I’ve shared in this newsletter before, drawing has always been and will always be close to the core of who I am, and what I do, so to offer 20 years of continuous work was not a stretch.  I’ve applied to this specific grant before, and not received it, and it’s likely that I will continue to apply to it and not receive it for my lifetime.  Regardless, I enjoyed the exercise of reviewing and curating twenty years’ worth of my artwork, even if the aspects of my practice most interesting to me are the current ones.

The grant application was divided into two parts.  In the first, I was asked to share up to 34 images corresponding to a continuous art practice of at least twenty years, shown in chronological order, with a gap of no more than three years between any two pieces.  In the second part, I was to offer 6 images all made within the last year or so, images best representing my current practice.

For this week, I’ll be sharing 7 to 11 images of the first twenty years each email Monday to Thursday, and the most recent 6 images on Friday.  Along the way, I’ll write a bit about each piece, why I chose it, what it meant to me at the time, and now.  I’ll also share (why not?) The 500 words I was required to write for the grant application, a “Statement of Artistic Concerns”.  Here was the prompt - including the all-caps font as it was written.  Why some of this copy was written in all-caps is a mystery.  Perhaps whoever prepared the application felt like they needed to get the applicants’ attention?  It feels like the font is yelling at me.  I see such typographic miscommunications as the lingering detritus of a previous age of art-world gatekeeping.  Maybe I read too much into this, maybe there is some convention I’m unaware of.

“Statement of Artistic Concerns (500 Words)

PLEASE ADDRESS THE FOLLOWING TOPICS IN YOUR NARRATIVE STATEMENT:

• DESCRIBE MAJOR THEMES YOU FOCUS ON IN YOUR WORK.

• HOW DID YOUR WORK ORIGINATE AND HOW HAS IT DEVELOPED OVER TIME?

• WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON CURRENTLY?”

A skillful handmade image is reassuring and empathic, whether a Paleolithic equestrian cave painting or a landscape watercolor. Such images validate nature's realities, reinforcing our capacity to behold and understand.

What is natural, what I can see, observe, understand, and draw, has always fascinated me, since my first exposure to life drawing when I was 13.  By two or three years into that practice, I had the ability to render in graphite the human form in a convincing manner - to allow some of the life essence of the subject, the person before me, to be alive on the 2-D surface of the paper.  From this initial experimentation with figure drawing came everything after, strengthening my abilities to perceive, to reflect, to patiently observe and render my lived, embodied experiences, memories, or imagination or dreams.

I have chased after difficulty, in media and subject.  Watercolor as a media, its permanence, its honesty in showing the full process of making, without the ability to correct or hide, has provided a 20-year challenge, still ongoing.  I love the immediacy of painting en plein air, outside, from life, to share the stories of atmosphere, mood, light of day, the specificity of place and time.  Just as a long-format figure drawing in graphite may take 20 or 30 hours of the model posing to complete, the making of a plein air landscape watercolor painting is coupled to the actual lived time spent observing the landscape change, and cannot be thematically separated from the image - the image is an expression of many moments, of a passage of time, not the camera’s single instant.  The effect of the work, but more importantly, the feeling of making such work, is valuable to me beyond estimate.

Over decades of practice observing and drawing and painting from life, my skillset has improved, but much more significantly, my vision has altered.  The six months I spent painting portraiture and still life, all in-studio, in Santa Fe, in oil, with an optical focus, permanently expanded my ability to see objectively in color, to see the true colors of the light itself, and to be able to (with strain) mix paint to honor my vision.  I returned to Seattle, seeing my home city as if for the first time in my life.

Each plein air watercolor painting is a performance, in real time, a reflection of a collection of observations and a living document of my presence and attention in the field. My work is honest, and challenging to make. Through iteration, I attempt to retrieve the effects of natural light in watercolor at a large scale, over and over. I seldom make revisions or changes in the studio - the marks seen are the marks made. This process can communicate an experience to the audience, a specific time, place, and light, a gateway to memories and shared realities.

—

This drawing was created while studying graphite portraiture with artist and mentor Anthony J Ryder, ever an inspiration to me and a lifelong friend.  I’ve learned more about making art from Tony than from anyone else.  This piece was made over three to five days of work (likely five) from the live model.  I encourage anyone curious about drawing like this to buy and read Tony’s incredible book, “The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing”, or to check out his and his wife Celeste’s studio in Santa Fe, The Ryder Studio.

This drawing was made in the same session as “Ishan, Three Quarters”, and is I believe a three-day or two-day drawing, about 10 to 15 hours of work.

This smaller drawing I made as a sketch of 2 or 3 hours, sitting in to Tony’s painting class the week after his workshop I attended had ended.  He allowed me to draw from the model, Ishan, who I’d already spent many hours studying.  This drawing is, to me, an early example of the power of visiting the same subject (or model) over and over again, as you begin to notice things, to see more, as you get to spend more time with a subject.  This isn’t thinking that I “know” what Ishan looks like - I have to discover that anew every time - it is more like there is a muscle memory that develops, that starts to be able to more accurately and more quickly draw - to be able to notice new things - to struggle less with the basics and engage with visual reality at a slightly more subtle level.

When I made this, I had returned the previous fall of 2005 from a three-month trip to Rome, part of my undergraduate college’s (Dartmouth) Language Study Abroad program.  There I had begun to really paint en plein air (outside, from life) in watercolor for the first time.  This piece is inside the Dartmouth studio art building, the Hopkins Center (the old one!), as a fellow art student goes about their practice.  What struck me was the subtle variations in light and reflection on the linoleum floor.  At this time I was almost always making a graphite (pencil) underdrawing first, and painting over that outline.

This painting was made en plein air, outside from life, sitting in the middle of the Dartmouth College quad during the full heat of midday summer.  I remember that painting this piece was a surprisingly physical effort, as I spent many hours over repeat sessions on hot days painting this view, with no shade to protect me, sweating profusely in sometimes 100 degree and massively humid New Hampshire summer afternoons.  I began as I usually did in this era with a very tight pencil underdrawing, just outlines, and then worked gradually over that with successively darker washes of watercolor.  This was not the tubes of liquid watercolor I work with now, but the small flat dry trays of watercolor available in travel kits.  From this era of my plein air watercolor work, this piece was the one I was most proud of, because it successfully communicated the feeling I wanted to convey - of the beauty of Dartmouth Hall shining electric lead white on a blazing grass-green summer day, the trees almost melting around it.

This painting has a lot of humor for me, even as I made it.  I have long loved the sport of rowing, and the college class in which this self-portrait in oil was made was almost in direct conflict with my rowing schedule.  Often I came straight from a very early morning practice to the studio to work on this piece, no shower, just as I was, tired, exhausted, and about to be chewed out by the art professor for “not really painting”.  To this day, I’m not sure what he meant by that comment.  I was proud of this piece at the time, and it remains to this day my only self-portrait in oil, and one of a very few self-portraits at all.  I’ve made I think fewer than ten, in my life.  “The Curse Of Lono” by Hunter Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, is resting on the back of the easel - as the assignment for this piece was to paint a self-portrait including a favorite book.  The t-shirt I’m wearing is a high school rowing shirt from Lakeside Crew, 2002, my sophomore year.

I made so few works of studio art while in graduate school.  The vast majority of my art practice or creative output was consumed by making studio work for my courses in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s GSD, the Graduate School of Design.  This sketch is a rare chance where I would let my imagination run wild (often in the more boring lecture classes), a zeppelin careening through the skies, and a sort of fun drawing exercise in linework (hatching) to convey the round volumes of a blimp.

This drawing was part of a series of twelve drawings, all studies of plants from photographic reference, as part of a plants class assignment in grad school, while getting my Master’s in Landscape Architecture.  This was part of the final work for my third and final year - a huge escape from the routine and (by then) drudgery of some of the other course obligations - as I was charged to simply draw twelve species of plants, identifiable by the drawings alone.  To be able to just… draw… was like a breath of fresh air, amidst the massive amount of computer and tight design work I was otherwise occupied with.  This bonsai is made from a photograph I took of the specimen at a greenhouse in Boston.

Thus concludes works 1 to 8 of 34 works demonstrating 20 years of continuous art making.  Next up for Tuesday, I’ll go over works 9 to 19.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email, email me at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or use the Contact Page of my website.

Cheers,

David